For Robert S. Smith, the Robert R. Colbert Sr. '48 Catholic Chaplain and Distinguished Scholar at Cornell, it's the shared conversations with members of the Cornell community that present some of his life's greatest gifts.

"Besides my personal experience of coming to live among students so much younger than myself, it became obvious that the threshold between 'what has been' and 'what is coming to be' is the very dynamic structure of university life," says Smith, who on May 31 will commemorate his 50th anniversary as an ordained Catholic priest. To mark this occasion, he has created a competition, the Janus Essays, to invite the Cornell community, in the spirit of Janus, the Roman god of thresholds, to begin a conversation on this subject.

The contest calls on students to submit an essay "imagining the next 50 years in their own life from a societal or personal perspective." Essays will be reviewed by Vice Provost Michele Moody-Adams, Dean of Students Kent Hubbell '67 and 10 additional professors. Students also are invited to submit a shared essay, written with a parent or faculty member on the topic "time lived; time to be lived," and submissions in creative forms other than an essay are welcome.

Four of the essays will receive an award of $500.

In looking back over 50 years as a Catholic priest, Smith notes: "I believe that living an authentic human life in a pluralistic world requires learning the art of friendship. By friendship, I mean the hard-won ability to enter the life or world of another person and return to your own, and to welcome the other into your own world: each one changed by the other but not into the other. In a university, this art of friendship takes the form of conversation sustained across varied intellectual and cultural backgrounds and experiences."

Smith encourages all members of the community to embrace this opportunity for thoughtfulness. "My hope is that the Janus Essays will be one way to contribute to this essential university conversation."

Smith was ordained a Catholic priest in 1958 and studied philosophy at the University of Louvain in Belgium. In the 1970s and 1980s, he served as a chaplain at Hofstra University and at SUNY Stony Brook, where he founded the Institute for Medicine in Contemporary Society to integrate the humanities into the education of medical students. Upon retiring from Stony Brook in 1997, he established the Sophia Center at the Diocesan seminary, a project for interfaith conversations on the relationship between religion and contemporary culture.

In 2002, Smith came to Cornell, where he says weekly Mass and serves as the adviser to the Pi Kappa Phi fraternity. In 2007 he received the A.D. White Administrator of the Year award from the Office of the Dean of Students.

"[The Janus Essays] is one of those rare vehicles," says Adam Dix '09, an applied economics and management major and close friend to Smith, "that can, if only for a short time, bring into perspective the many dizzying changes our society has experienced in our lifetimes. It inspires different generations to ask themselves that same simple yet lasting question: Where have we come from, and where are we going?"

Submissions for the Janus Essays will be accepted until April 6.

The Janus Essays are co-sponsored by the Center for Ethics and Public Life, the Office of the Dean of Students, the American Studies Program, the Cornell Catholic Community, Cornell United Religious Work and Pi Kappa Phi fraternity.

For more information see http://www.janusessays.org or e-mail JanusEssays@gmail.com.

Elan Greenberg '08 is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle and past-president of Pi Kappa Phi fraternity.